October 22 2014
Kristen Brown is a United Methodist minister based in the Tantur Institute in Jerusalem as a liaison for her church. She is also associated with St Andrew’s Scots Memorial Church, where she shares in leading worship (she likes this almost as much as I do).
Last week, we were driving a friend of hers from the Old City to the Hebrew University when he got us lost in an Arab village. “Arabs here pay the same taxes as Jews,” she said, looking at state of the roads on which we were driving round in circles, “but they don’t get the same services.”
Which was undeniably true.
On Sunday, like others following the Revised Common Lectionary, I preached on paying, or not paying, taxes to Caesar. Later in the day, I plugged this on our FaceBook page as “my non-political political sermon”.
On my own FaceBook page, I tried a different advertising ploy: “Rendering to Caesar (the salad dude). Be excellent to each other.” If you have no idea what that was about, click here and here.
But “non-political political”?
This is partly my wife’s fault. Unlike me, Vivien grew up Protestant. She thinks that to be Christian is to be biblical; I didn’t even own a Bible until I was an undergraduate. So her view is that sermons should focus on the Bible; anything else is just decoration, a flower on the tree; and it’s not good when you can’t see the biblical wood for the political flower.
I find this helpful.
It saves me from thinking that people understand the core of the gospel, so I can focus on how we live it out. Indeed, it saves me from thinking that I understand the core of the gospel and can therefore focus on how we live it out.
Last Sunday, in a sermon with no flowers or decorations at all, I took this almost too much to heart. What is the use of a sermon, as Alice might have asked, without pictures or illustrations?
Here’s an illustration I very nearly used, before I cut it out.
I almost quoted Tom Wright:
“Imagine how you’d like it if you woke up one morning and discovered that people from the other end of the world had marched in to your country and demanded that you pay them tax as the reward for having stolen your land!” – Matthew for Everyone (London: SPCK, 2002), 86
And I almost added, “There are people in this country who have no difficulty imagining this.”
But I didn’t do that.
Sometimes it’s better to let people connect their own dots.